Put A Sock On It

As we hiked past those bare mannequin legs punctuated by black anklets in the Burberry windows lo all these months, we wondered: Would the socks-plus-sandals phenom play in Peoria?

While we can’t speak for the heartland, we can report on the goings-on inside our very own offices. And so far, the trend has only caught on with the young ‘uns. Nicole Keating, for example, sports some adorable iteration nearly every day. (Sheer black with booties, dainty fare with pumps, you name it.) “I love this look,” she says. “You can take something very simple and feminine and make it edgy with socks. I just ‘styled’ my roommate this morning. She was wearing denim shorts and a purple babydoll top and I put her in gray ribbed knee socks with black dressy heels. I impressed myself!”

Jill Stuart, Burberry Prorsum

Two members of Alex White’s stellar team—Martha Violante and Kat Typaldos—also indulge on occasion. But for Martha, it’s mainly for practicality’s sake. “It’s so cold in here,” she says, shivering and tugging on her black knee-highs. “I needed a transition from the heat outside to the freezing AC.”

But for one staffer, who requested anonymity, socks-plus-sandals trigger some seriously unpleasant childhood memories. “When I was a little girl in the Kibbutz in Israel, we would wear socks under our sandals in the summer when we went to milk the goats before school so we didn’t get straw or other smelly things between our toes,” she recalls. “I guess we were setting a trend. Who knew?”